In recent years, the use of wireless and RF technology has increased dramatically in portable and hand-held units, where such units may be deployed by a variety of individuals from soldier on the battlefield to a mother searching for her daughter's friend's house. The uses of wireless technology are widespread, increasing, and include but are not limited to telephony, Internet e-mail, Internet web browsers, global positioning, photography, and in-store navigation.
Within each hand-held or portable wireless device there is a highly sensitive chain of RF electronics providing both the transmission and receiver functions. These circuits require not only direct manipulation of the RF signal, for example by amplification, attenuation, mixing or detection, but also ancillary functions such as power monitoring, signal identification, and control. Additionally these functions may be undertaken post-mixing, such that the signals are at a lower RF frequency (typically called the IF or Intermediate Frequency) than the original received signal.
Increasingly therefore such wireless electronics must provide simultaneous optimization of the function at lowest cost whilst also offering:                Wide dynamic range for maximum coverage from wireless infrastructure,        Flexible operation at high and low power levels for transmit and receive functions in same wireless device,        Operation on multiple frequencies to provide single wireless device with widest coverage against multiple worldwide standards, and        Low power consumption under all conditions to provide maximum standby and use times for user.        
In today's commercially demanding requirements for providing highly adaptive amplification within wireless devices, with multiple frequency regimes, multiple international protocol standards, widely ranging microwave signal levels and the commercial benefits of achieving these in wireless devices with smaller physical size, using lower cost components, which leads to minimizing die footprint on semiconductor manufacturing techniques.
It would be advantageous to provide for a design solution for microwave amplifiers exploiting parallel gain circuits to supports these demands, whilst reducing power consumption, thereby providing for increased battery lifetime.
It would be further advantageous if the approach provided for a solution that allowed for increased semiconductor integration by reducing number and/or type of elements required, provided enhanced manufacturing efficiency and eliminating a need for a large quantity of bulky discrete external components.